by Melissa Keith

A year ago, Tamara Rae Vandewiel was wishing her Facebook friends a Happy Family Day, a provincial holiday celebrated in Ontario. Today, the standardbred caretaker and mother of two young children is recovering from a vicious horse attack.

Vandewiel is the partner of trainer Kyle Bossence, who was accompanying her to a hospital appointment when contacted this week. He confirmed that she had been badly hurt by a stallion, but was unable to provide further details at the time. In a follow-up text message, Bossence apologized and said he was also struggling to “keep up with all the snow and horses” after a recent storm. 

Bossence is the 2021 O’Brien Future Star Award winner and trains several current Woodbine Mohawk Park performers, including maiden trotter Forbidden One, Johnstown Jet (p, 2, 1:56.2f; $13,598), Iwishihadame (p, 5, 1:53.3f; $36,211), and Valuable Miss (3, 1:54.2s; $192,041). In a Jan. 2019 interview with Standardbred Canada, he called Vandewiel “an outstanding groom,” who had “started helping [him] full time in 2018,” the year he was first named a finalist for the Future Star Award.

“I definitely could not have done it without her,” Bossence said in the SC interview.

Former Mohawk trainer Casie Coleman said she wanted to help when she heard about the extent of Vandewiel’s injuries from a mutual friend organizing an online fundraiser.

“I saw that Megan Downey posted it on Facebook,” Coleman said. “I was actually on vacation in Cancun, so I said I’d donate a breeding to McWicked and a breeding to Sportswriter. [Downey] was just on Facebook, donating $1,000 of her own stuff.”

On Feb. 1, Downey posted: “Please help my friend Tamara Rae Vandewiel and her family during this horrific time. She was savaged by a feral stallion and will have to undergo multiple surgeries to fix the tendons and ligaments and will have a long road to recovery.”

The fundraiser, which is now finished, raised around $12,000, said Coleman. Tickets for the online raffle to support Vandewiel through her recovery were sold by Downey for $25 each. Various equestrian items were offered, as well as the two stallion services donated by the multiple O’Brien Award-winning trainer.

Coleman shared details of Vandewiel’s brave escape from what could have been a lethal savaging.

“It wasn’t a standardbred; it was a warmblood rescue,” Coleman said. “I guess it grabbed a hold of her over the stall door… She was doing everything she could to get away. It was trying to pull her over the gate, into the stall. She ended up remembering that [veterinary technician and harness horseman] Laverne Turnbull would take the horse’s tongue to the outside of its mouth, to distract them. She did that, and that’s how she got free.”

Coleman said she knew Vandewiel as a capable horsewoman.

“Tamara was with me for a while,” said the trainer, now based in Florida after scaling back her racing stock in Ontario. “She worked for me when I was at Classy Lane [Training Centre, in Puslinch, ON]. It was a way back, like years ago. I knew her through her mother, Darlene Hayes, who breeds thoroughbreds and standardbreds at Hillsborough Stables [in Millgrove, ON.]”

The unnamed warmblood stallion attacked Vandewiel on the same property where Bossence’s racehorses are based in Arthur, ON.

“It was on the farm,” Coleman said. “Nobody was in the barn with her. She knew to run to another barn where other people were, and asked them to apply [a tourniquet] to her arm, and they called an ambulance.”

Coleman added that she heard that Vandewiel already had “two surgeries to get the nerve damage and skin grafting done.”

As of Feb. 14, the dangerous stallion had been removed from the farm, but not euthanized.

“Animal control were doing testing to see if the horse had rabies,” Coleman said. “They can’t put the horse down yet. They need to wait two weeks for the rabies test.”

Although Downey’s fundraising raffle is over, Vandewiel’s recovery is just beginning. There will likely be other efforts to assist the caretaker and her family through this difficult time. Coleman said she could relate to the battle ahead, as she too had faced a life-altering stable accident, back in 2000 when she was working as a groom for trainer Bill Davis at British Columbia’s Sandown Park.

“I went through a barn fire and, at one time, they didn’t think I would walk again,” Coleman said. “She works in the barn and has two young kids. I did message her, just to say, ‘Keep your head up and keep fighting; stay strong.’”

DROP QUOTES:

“It wasn’t a standardbred [that attacked Tamara Rae Vandewiel]; it was a warmblood rescue. I guess it grabbed a hold of her over the stall door… She was doing everything she could to get away. It was trying to pull her over the gate, into the stall. She ended up remembering that [veterinary technician and harness horseman] Laverne Turnbull would take the horse’s tongue to the outside of its mouth, to distract them. She did that, and that’s how she got free.”

— Casie Coleman

“I went through a barn fire and, at one time, they didn’t think I would walk again. [Tamara Rae Vandewiel] works in the barn and has two young kids. I did message her, just to say, ‘Keep your head up and keep fighting; stay strong.’”

— Casie Coleman